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Beyond Safety: Is Robotic Surgery Sustainable?
Hallie Siegel writes: The release last week of the study on adverse events in robotic surgery led to much discussion on the safety and effectiveness of robotic surgical procedures. MIT Sloane's Matt Beane argues that while the hope is that this dialogue will mean safer and more effective robotic procedures in the future, the intense focus on safety and effectiveness has compromised training opportunities for new robotic surgeons, who require many hours of 'live' surgical practice time to develop their skills. Beane says that robotic surgery will likely continue to expand in proportion to other methods, given that it allows fewer surgeons to perform surgery with less trauma to the patient, but no matter how safe we make robotic surgical procedures, they will become a luxury available to a very few if we fail to address the sustainability of the practice.
That's what markets are for. If there's a high demand for robot operators in the medical industry, then more people will sign up for the money. That assumes that the cartels controlling access to the medical professions don't block this.
The issue seems to be that while conventional surgery requires help from students robotic surgery does not. It becomes very difficult for a student to do part of the surgery and thereby learn by doing. A possible solution would be better simulations so that a student can learn by doing. I think it is a very different than working on a cadaver or simulated patient using conventional methods. The main one being that there is already a separation from the patient by the machine. Every image and feedback that the doctor gets through the robotic surgery device can be simulated by software. It can be programmed to simulate problems so the doctor has to deal with more realistic issues. In effect a flight simulator for surgery.
I'm not sure how this got modded up, but that was standard practice in the 1920s... not today. We have standardized procedures for damned near everything you can think of.
I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep for cardiac surgery. My hospital does around 400-500 hearts a year... and we don't kill any dogs.
Complete Adrenalectomy.
Done at 7AM on Monday went home noon on Tuesday afternoon. Nothing but Tylonel, pain free by Wed morning. Dr. said less than a cup of blood was lost.
Now I have 5 cool looking, little holes that I tell people were gunshot wounds.
He used a Da Vinci robot.
Alternative was open surgery, complete with a 6 inch incision and a week in the hospital.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.